Spam as a writing prompt

E-mail spam is getting harder and harder to ignore. Not because my filters aren't doing a good job, but because the spammers are getting so doggone creative. A while back they learned that randomly-generated sentences and paragraphs could look important enough to fool our filters and slide into our inboxes. Lately the "compositions" have been getting better, and I've been reading them when I need a chuckle. Here's a good one:

When you see the sheriff, it means that an abstraction of a cowboy leaves. If the customer beyond a chess board sells some minivan about the traffic light to some greasy blood clot, then a knowingly treacherous salad dressing panics.

Sounds like something from a beat generation poet, don't you think?

A graduated cylinder related to a stovepipe throws a thoroughly impromptu bullfrog at a steam engine, or an infected apartment building finds subtle faults with a crispy traffic light.

If you're a fiction writer and are unable to harvest at least three story ideas from those excerpts, you're just not trying very hard. But even if you're not in the mood to write an entire novel, you could have some fun with this: just string together two or three of these sentences, apply a little judicious editing, and you'll have an excellent entry for the next Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Come to think of it, a couple of last year's winners did look familiar....


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